This section is intended to provide a background or context to the invention that is recited in the claims. The description herein may include concepts that could be pursued, but are not necessarily ones that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, what is described in this section is not prior art to the description and claims in this application and is not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Visual content of an image or a video may be segmented into semantically meaningful regions, for example into foreground and background. While it has turned out to be difficult to implement fully automatic image segmentation, it has been proposed to utilize user interaction through capable devices in order to improve the overall performance.
Various technologies for interactive image segmentation are currently investigated and developed. In various applications a foreground object (or object of interest) may be extracted out of a possibly cluttered background in images with user-provided indications. The segmentation result may facilitate numerous applications, for instance compositing a new background, creating bokeh on the background, removing an object which is not desired to exist in the image, and stylizing background or object etc.
Some types of user interactions used for interactive image segmentation are drawing scribbles on foreground objects, possibly also on background objects, and possibly drawing a rectangle or an approximate contour around object of interest. Then, the segmentation process, such as a graph cut, may be started.